Russia evacuates 27 children from al-Hol camp with defence ministry plane

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Russia evacuated 27 children from al-Hol camp in northeast Syria late on Thursday night using a Russian defence ministry plane, the office of a presidency-affiliated children's rights commissioner has announced.

The children, aged between 2 and 13, were flown overnight into Moscow's Chkalovsky airport, a statement from the press office of the Commissioner for the Rights of the Child Anna Kuznetsova said.

The children will undergo medical examinations and a coronavirus quarantine before being sent to relatives in five different regions, the statement said. 

Russia's repatriation of children from Syria ground to a halt when the coronavirus outbreak began to take international hold. They resumed in August, when 26 children were repatriated, according to Russian state media outlet TASS. An additional 15 children were repatriated from Syria in September.

Another flight is expected soon, with DNA tests taken from another 27 Russian children from al-Hol camp for subsequent paperwork, according to the statement.

“It was finally possible to carry out DNA sampling, which means that the work on the returns will continue,” the statement quoted Kuznetsova as saying.

Kuznetsova visited Damascus to discuss repatriations with Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad in February 2020. At the end of her visit, 26 children from northeast Syria were flown back to Russia. Kuznetsova had already struck an agreement on the repatriation of Russian children with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus in September 2019.

According to the commissioner's statement, Russia has repatriated 224 from Syria and Iraq since the summer of 2017.

Approximately 70,000 people live in the northeast Syrian camps of al-Hol and Roj, most of whom are women and children who either fled or were rounded up as the Islamic State (ISIS) began to lose ground in the country from 2017 onwards. Around 13,000 of those held at the camps are non-Iraqi foreigners.

Kurdish-led authorities have called for countries to repatriate their nationals from the camps, but few governments have heeded the call.

Though Russia has fared better at taking its nationals back than western European countries, Russian campaigners working on the repatriation of women and children have said their government is not taking the issue seriously enough. 

There are no exact figures on the number of Russian children currently in Iraq and Syria, but Kheda Saratova, a repatriation activist and advisor to Chechen leader Ramazan Kadyrov estimated in February 2019 that there could be as many as 1,400.

Local authorities began removing some of the estimated 25,000 Syrian nationals living at al-Hol earlier this month.